Demonstrations & Workshops

Craft demonstrations and entertainments

Demonstration or Workshop?

While our demonstrations and entertainments are as hands on and have a go as safety allows, several can also be given as a fuller ‘workshop’ activity. Please use the navigation bars on the right to go to each topic page to see where this is possible.

NEW!!! – The Amazing Travelling Camera Obscura:

Now available for both outside on grass and suitable hard standing/indoor events: Come and see us to enjoy the Camera Obscura experience!

For further details of the Obscura and other optical entertainments please click to see our full Eye Magic! presentation under our Demonstrations section.

The work of the Paternosterer – at least in public and in England – has to be firmly set before the Reformation! (Far too dangerous later to proclaim a Catholic faith as a professional rosary maker…)

Skills such as those of the Cordwainer can also more effectively be shown for the earlier periods making plainer, flatter shoes or boots using simple lasts. Otherwise general leather work skills can be offered in the making of small boxes, cases or bags.

Games, equipment and puzzles are properly tied to their period and social context by highlighting popular pastimes or crazes and using appropriate playing cards, dice, boards, toys or equipment.

Some of the craft demonstrations work equally well when offered over a very wide historical range : Chandlery can be done as a medieval Craft, pre-industrial cottage industry or even in a nineteenth/early twentieth century Arts & Crafts context.

While my partner and I generally work together at Chandlery – and candle dipping with sealing wax stamping really does require both of us, not least for safety – we are able to provide two distinct demonstration

Our newest presentation Eye Magic! offers an opportunity to join us for a hands-on experience of pre-cinema optical implements and kinetic toys, illusions and moving pictures: We have a huge range of originl and re-created instruments – from camera obscura via zograscope to graphoscope – spanning Renaissance to 20th century

We are always keen to research new crafts, occupations and topics so please do contact us if there is a particular presentation you would like us to consider.